Quarantined Creativity on the Wall

April 19, 2020

Just because we can’t take new photos doesn’t mean we can’t create new art.

It has been several years since my camera has sat idle for this long. Granted, I could continue taking it out in the yard and taking pictures of things like sticks in the grass and dog poop, but it’s been a little cold and wet this week and, quite honestly, I’m feeling something less than inspired by the whole idea at the moment. Still, there is a need to shake things up and do something different. What could I do? What should I do?

I should read some of those emails that I’ve been ignoring, that’s what I should do. I’ve had an account with Saatchi Art for something in the neighborhood of nine or ten years and have done absolutely nothing with it over that period of time. I don’t remember why necessarily. Chances are it hit at a time where there were a lot of such sites coming online and I just got tired of uploading the same images all the time. Or there might have been something about the original format that I didn’t like. I don’t remember. Yet, with amazing precision, they have continued sending me regular emails encouraging me to upload artwork to their site.

Not having anything better to do, I reconsidered what is going on over there and decided that perhaps this might be a better deal than what I’ve been getting from Fine Art America. For starters, I have more control over the price, which is kinda important. Then, there’s the fact that Saatchi doesn’t try and slap art on low-cost swag such as yoga mats and coffee cups. Those things decrease the overall value of the art, in my opinion. The ability to display more than 25 photos at a time was a significant factor as well.

What was important to me, though, was that if I was going to display art on a new site, it needed be works that I hadn’t already tried selling. And, given that tossing new work on a website doesn’t take that long, it made sense to me that I should go back through the archive and, at the very least, give images a strong update and, in many cases, completely re-imagine the works, creating something new. So, for the past two weeks I’ve been focused on creating new works, many of which represent multiple days of processing, rejecting, re-processing, and multi-processing images to create new pieces for upload. As of this morning, there are 27 pieces of artwork on the website.

One of the things that I really like, though, is the ability to show the work as it might appear mounted on a wall. I think this is significant because when one is simply looking at a picture on a website it can be almost impossible to imagine how it might look in your own home. This helps solve that problem. So, rather than just posting pictures of the new images, I’m posting pictures of them mounted on walls. If you want to see a larger resolution version of the picture itself, click the link under the picture. You’ll also find full descriptions of each image.

Go and take a look around. My goal is to have 50 images up and for sale by the end of the month. That’s a lot, to be sure, given all the time and work I’m putting into them, but I like the idea of being able to offer a lot more than what we’ve previously been able to do.